Johnny Moreno
Orestes, played by Julian Elijah Martinez, scrawls an obscene message across his bathroom wall in red lipstick at the climax of Boris Yeltsin, Portuguese playwright Mickaël de Oliveira’s reimagining of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, running through Saturday night at the Yale Cabaret.
It reads: Fuck the myth!!!
Set in the aftermath of the Portuguese Colonial War instead of the Trojan War, Yeltsin tells the story of an Orestes who never had to avenge his father, Agamemnon — here Boris, played by George Hampe. A cocktail of bourgeoisie characters and Greek cynicism, most of the play’s props involve liquor, and Hampe’s Boris is at his best while precariously holding a teeming shot glass.
A sometimes not-so-subtle homoeroticism runs throughout the play. Boris opens Yeltsin with a charismatic soliloquy about angel erections. Like Chekov’s famous gun, Boris’s description of the naked angel manifests, again and again. The finest acting comes from two nude men in a not-so-large bathtub full of water, where Aeschylus’s version sees Agamemnon murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, played by Jesse Rasmussen (what else do you expect, when you hang a broadsword in your bathroom?).The nudity is tasteful, of course, but a bit distracting. It’s hard to recall what transpires after the second full frontal exposure; the next thing I knew, Cassandra (Shadi Ghaheri), Agamemnon’s mystical slave, spoke in tongues, something was foiled, the live band left their post and sang happy birthday to Clytemnestra in Portuguese — and then lights went out. We applauded.
If Cassandra does not quite steal the show from the postmodern phone booth Boris keeps her in, she does establish a dark tone for a play wrought with otherwise frivolous dialogue, an impressive feat considering that Ghaheri’s lines are gibberish. The character serves as a weirdly mute chorus, a constant reminder of Agamemnon’s dark past, as she bangs against her booth with an exotic wand from time to time.
“She bangs the door because we make too much noise,” Boris assures us.
Scene designer Claire Deliso brings the Yeltsin residence to life throughout the Yale Cabaret’s space, as the performance crosses into the audience. This serves a purpose: Every night Orestes drags an unwitting audience member on stage as his confidant.
As irreverent as Boris Yeltsin may be, however, its outcomes reaffirm Greek notions of fate. Sure, the characters reference Back to the Future and Britney Spears where Aeschylus originally references other Greek plays and invokes Olympic deities. But as Boris himself reminds us, “Names don’t really matter, they only serve to protect what they hide.”